Ten Years Ago I Lost A Race for Young Republican National Chairman. I Don't Regret It.

When I was young and getting involved in Republican politics, I tended to avoid the Young Republicans. I dabbled here and there with involvement depending on who was speaking or who was involved. I dabbled at the edges, but I wasn’t exactly a regular. I attended my first State YR convention on a whim, mainly to talk to the guest speaker more than anything else.

That was the first time I met an obnoxious, self-entitled, self-centered brat named Nicolee Ambrose.

I avoided the Young Republicans like so many involved Republicans at the time did; it was “the life of the party” only insofar as they liked happy hour a lot. There were few Young Republican organizations making meaningful contributions in Maryland. YR’s were seen as insular, and parochial, often circling the wagons when ideas came from the outside.

I only got really involved in 2008, when outside Republicans tried to anoint a Republican YR leadership here in Anne Arundel County. Once we shut that down, I found myself as the President of the Anne Arundel Young Republicans. A spot I would hold for two more years.

Over the next five years, I invested myself in state and national Young Republican leadership. I served two terms as Maryland Young Republicans Chairman (the first to be elected twice and the only Chair unanimously elected twice). I served as Assistant Secretary and Regional Vice-Chairman in the National organization. I was a major player in national YR affairs. Even if I didn’t necessarily want to be.

In the fall of 2012, there was speculation as to who would serve as the next Young Republican National Chair. Many names were discussed, myself included, and we attempted to get several people in a room during a National meeting in Omaha, Nebraska to figure out exactly who was doing what. That meeting never happened….

In late December I decided that I would run for Chairman myself, assembling a ticket that included Michigan Chairman Scott Czasak, future YR Chairman Jason Emert, and our own

Jim Fossel

.

Our campaign was focused on three major tenets. In fact, this below is copied and pasted from our inaugural email:

• State Empowerment: The YRNF is only as strong as our state clubs; we must be a resource to our states to encourage innovation and the creation of new and better methods of growing state and local clubs and reaching the base.

• Aggressive Outreach: The YRNF must be at the forefront of establishing the Republican message and delivering it to the next generation of voters while ensuring conservative groups and leaders understand the value of our members.

• A Data-Driven Organization: The YRNF must effectively use and integrate data to determine the effectiveness of our outreach and deployment strategies

Arguably, it was prophetic to see what was coming for the future; being aggressive and using data to win. Unfortunately, we also saw that national Republicans are preferring to consolidate power and messaging at the top, not giving states the leeway to maneuver.

Two friends, Jason Weingartner and Mike Bayham, also ran. Fortunately, by YR standards, the campaign was reasonably tame (at least by the campaigns and candidates). Young Republican campaigns tend to degenerate into bitter nonsense with ex-candidates leaving the organization in droves. It is usually Sayre’s Law at work: "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake."

Unlike most national tickets, I made a conscious decision to not raise money. I paid for my travel and my materials out of my own pocket. The reason? It made more sense for donors to invest in the organization and in Republican candidates than it did to invest in a campaign that meant practically nothing to anybody outside of the organization.

At the convention in Mobile, Alabama ten years ago today, Bayham dropped out and nominated me. My ticket lost. Unlike Republicans of modern times, we lost with some class; when it became apparent Jason Weingartner would win, I withdrew and requested the convention elect him by acclamation.

On the bright side, nobody let me pay for a drink the rest of the night…

I would stay involved with the national committee and the state for two more years, until my term as state Chairman ended. I did flirt with the idea of making a second bid for Chairman in 2015, even discussing with a few people the idea of running from the floor as a compromise candidate in what looked like would be a three-way race. But that did not materialize, I endorsed a good candidate and exited stage right.

I don’t regret running. But I do wonder if I had been elected to this post if there was anything I could have done to stem the tide of populism and nonsense that ended up plaguing the GOP. What could I have done to train better young leaders than the ones that populate the current young professional class of GOP that exists in some parts of the country?

These days the National Young Republicans seem to have been turned by Chairman Rich Loughery into his own personal vanity project to make benefit glorious leader. Meanwhile, local clubs like the Washington DC Young Republicans and New York Young Republicans have made populism and worshipping Donald Trump the centerpiece of their existence.

Such behavior on the account of national and these certain local groups makes it difficult to attract younger voters to even consider voting Republican, much less joining the organization and becoming a conservative activist.

I regret nothing about running and nothing about addressing the issues I wanted to discuss. I only would have regretted not running with how everything played out. But I only can imagine how much the political landscape of the young conservative movement might have changed had I won. Would it have been drastically different, or was the die already cast? We’ll never know.